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What are your top 5 tasks you would implement right now, if you had the manpower, the approvals, the money and the time? Why would these be so important to our community and how will they help us out?

And knowing that this is a dream list, what obstacles do you see in the way of these tasks coming to fruition?

Ami LevinNew MemberPosts:12

23 Sep 2013 11:11 AM

Hi again TJay,

My top priority task list consists of: 1. Expanding the speaker pool by establishing a professional mentoring program to nurture the future generation of speakers. 2. Introducing new speakers to PASS chapters by creating a global platform to share speaker expertise, details and schedules. 3. Encouraging volunteer initiatives by establishing simple, well defined support processes and communication channels 4. Enhancing global presence and visibility by providing localized technical content, participating in user groups, local events and via strategic partners. 5. Making all existing technical content more accessible by indexing and tagging all available and new public session recordings, virtual chapter archives, YouTube videos, and 24 HOP archives and providing search, playlist management and feedback capabilities.

The above items are key to support my missions as director to strengthen community engagement and expand global activity. There are many obstacles waiting for us down the line. The most obvious obstacles are limited resources and venturing into new, less familiar territories. I believe that both types of obstacles can be conquered with careful strategic planning, constant monitoring and the agility to respond quickly to changing situations and community feedback.

Hi Tjay, Great question and thank you for engaging with the election process! It is good to hear from you. Here are my top 5:

1. Do a member merge on the PASS membership list. I am sure I am not the only one with multiple memberships! 2. Support volunteers, the lifeblood of PASS. Make MyPass much easier to use. Hold volunteer skills webinars, twitter chats and google hangouts so that volunteers can get to know one another more easily. 3. Social media strategy. It enables everything else; outreach, recruitment and retention of new volunteers, speakers, and members. It spans technical disciplines. It helps the global communities to grow. Why not have a LATAM twitterchat, for example? In one of the local languages? 4. Take a step back to take steps forward, based on data. Where are PASS growing? What about the Russian community, for example? How can we learn from non-PASS events and organisations. 5. The Business Analytics community - I would like to forge this forward. All of the above would go towards supporting this nascent community. I'd love to see BASaturdays as well as SQLSaturdays, for example. Why not?

And a cheeky number 6: my 'task' would be to thank each and everyone who has made this campaign good, fair and honest, and has taken the time to engage. This goes from the existing Directors, the Nom Com, and everyone who has taken the time to engage (like you have, TJay) over Twitter, and taken the time to vote. So a cheeky number 6: my thanks to the SQLFamily who have allowed me to have this opportunity to serve them better. Even if I am not elected, I will be grateful for all the interactions and support that I've had along the way, and those memories will last a long time.

Thank you, Jen

Richard DouglasNew MemberPosts:12

24 Sep 2013 04:37 PM

Hi TJay,

Thanks for your question and continued involvement in the election process.

In your other question in the forum I listed 5 areas for improvement, so rather than regurgitate that content I am going to highlight some of the areas I think that need addressing from my application form. Although there are 3 main areas, like Jen I have listed 6 tasks:

* Increase membership engagement and participation in existing locales by 25% over the coming twelve months. For example: * Enhance Regional mentors by possibly twinning PASS chapters across the globe to encourage collaboration of sharing success stories and challenges.

* Streamline the delivery of key learning content to via the primary PASS delivery channels to make this more accessible and consumable for PASS memberships to help them achieve their learning goals For example: * By reorganizing the excellent content already available as well as creating new content to align with the various certification syllabuses * By having a centralized library of resources will help to encourage participation in the virtual chapters and by tagging the webinars we can categorize them into the various syllabuses that the exams require knowledge of. * Potential launch of new PASS study chapters, physical or virtual where likeminded people can meet to discuss their objectives and the issues that they face. I believe that this ticks many of the boxes of PASS’s mission statement.

* Expose and share high quality speaking resources and streamline event delivery. For example: * Create a unified session submission system and speaker bureau where speakers can enter sessions for all PASS events and select the areas they would also be willing to present them in. This provides extra value to chapter leaders allowing them the opportunity to pick speakers that they may not know about that would be willing to deliver topics in their area. * When a physical or virtual chapter meeting is announced it would automatically be added to an event management system that would keep track of categories and locations. A PASS member would then be able to do a search of BI sessions in the Washington area and receive iCal files for every meeting that fits their criteria.

There are of course other things that I would like to bring to the table such as a feasibility study of a PASS certification program which could be seen as an extension of my point which talks about aligning current educational material with syllabus's.

With regards to obstacles the first will be ensuring that the rest of the board agrees that these tasks are achievable and can come in using the budget available. Other obstacles will include negotiating priorities of other tasks that the other Directors will want to bring to the table. Once negotiations have taken place teams will need to be put in place to ensure that the work can be carried out on time and on budget.

Once again thanks for your question and your desire to help others ensure they pick the candidate(s) that share their own values.

Rich

Allen KinselNew MemberPosts:10

25 Sep 2013 04:58 AM

Good Morning Tjay,

Since You’re talking about dream lists this one is relatively easy. Reality is much more painful!

Top 5 tasks in no particular order, 1) Clean up the Membership roster and enforce some sort of membership requirements ie. We need more than an email address for a person to be a “PASS member in good standing” Doing this will enable many of our other priorities around globalization and content delivery

2) Create a priority list for IT systems that pass needs to create or improve. At the top of my list are improvements for the Chapters/VC’s and SQLSaturdays. A core piece of this is the now infamous “speaker bureau” Its time to make this system a reality as there are few things PASS should invest in more than connecting speakers and the community leaders who need them

3) PASS should create committees for board level portfolios and combine them where it made sense then I’d ask volunteers to serve on those committees. Doing this would create two great benefits for the community; one would be higher level leadership opportunities for volunteers who wanted to do more. The second benefit would be to enable Board members to dedicate their time to more strategic longer term thinking to ensure the viability of the organization.

4) Encourage and enable volunteers. It’s time for PASS to develop a genuine strategy to accommodate volunteers in order to properly harness their enthusiasm for the community. Its currently quite difficult to maintain enthusiasm as a PASS volunteer unless you are also a speaker and its been said more than once that most people would rather face death than public speaking. Not enabling those members who don’t speak (like me) from volunteering significantly reduces the overall pool of volunteers.

5) PASS Should create a sponsorship management system that accounts for the needs of all of PASS’s events (and chapters) to allow our sponsors to become true partners and enable them to have a one stop shop so to speak to sponsor all events (that want to be sponsored)

Task 1: Strengthen all Virtual Chapters by having global representation

I would also work with the Virtual Chapter leaders to grow their volunteer teams to include volunteers and leaders from other geographical regions. These leaders can then reach out to SQL Server professionals in their communities that might not be near a local chapter, but would like to connect, share, and learn with others in the field. I believe this will not only strengthen the virtual chapter, but also PASS as a whole through the networking and knowledge sharing of the community at large.

Task 2: Encourage more interaction among Virtual Chapter members

One of the items missing with Virtual Chapters is the presence of a forum or chat room, available after a session,etc., where one can share further insights or experiences on a particular topic.

Task 3: Enable searching capability for all PASS VC sessions

Work with PASS IT to develop the capability to search across all VC sessions. Today. it is difficult to search for sessions across the Virtual Chapters that might be of interest. I would work with other VCs and PASS IT in adding this type of search to its web presence.

Task 4: Partner with Business Analytics initiatives The Business Intelligence Chapter and the Business Analytics Chapter have partnered together well this past year. I would like to see this partnership continue to grow and strengthen. This includes partnering more with our Excel Community Brothers and Sisters, as well as with Big data vendors, etc.

Task 5: Strengthen the BAC and Summit program selection process. The program selection process has evolved into a structured and repeatable process. It would be my goal to continue to see this process evolve to be more fluid during the scheduling phases, as well as in the selection phase. To accomplish this, I would work closely with PASS HQ and IT to enhance the software and reports being used to be more aligned with the process flow and assist more in the scheduling aspects. This would benefit PASS by having a process and supporting software that can be leveraged by any size or type of conference, including SQLSaturday, SQLRally, BA Conference, and Summit.